Yoma 20b ~ From The Talmudology Yom Kippur Archives: Sound Propagation at Night

In discussing the service on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish Year, the Talmud notes that the voice of the Cohen Gadol, the High Priest, could be heard from a distance of ten parsangs. In case you were wondering, a parsang is an old Persian measure, and is about 3 miles or almost 5km. This means that the voice of the High Priest could be heard over 30 miles away! The Talmud notes that it could be heard at this distance even during the day, when sound does not travel as far as it does at night. Here it is, in the original:

שקלים כ,א

דְּאָמַר מָר: וּכְבָר אָמַר ״אָנָא הַשֵּׁם״ וְנִשְׁמַע קוֹלוֹ בִּירִיחוֹ. וְאָמַר רַבָּה בַּר בַּר חָנָה אָמַר רַבִּי יוֹחָנָן: מִירוּשָׁלַיִם לִירִיחוֹ עֲשַׂר פַּרְסֵי

וְאַף עַל גַּב דְּהָכָא אִיכָּא חוּלְשָׁא, וְהָכָא לֵיכָּא חוּלְשָׁא. וְהָכָא יְמָמָא, וְהָתָם לֵילְיָא

דְּאָמַר רַבִּי לֵוִי: מִפְּנֵי מָה אֵין קוֹלוֹ שֶׁל אָדָם נִשְׁמָע בַּיּוֹם כְּדֶרֶךְ שֶׁנִּשְׁמָע בַּלַּיְלָה? מִפְּנֵי גַּלְגַּל חַמָּה שֶׁמְּנַסֵּר בָּרָקִיעַ כְּחָרָשׁ הַמְנַסֵּר בַּאֲרָזִים

There already was an incident where the High Priest recited, in his confession that accompanied the placing of hands on his bull on Yom Kippur: Please God, and his voice was heard in Jericho. And Rabba bar bar Chana said that Rabbi Yochanan said: The distance from Jerusalem to Jericho is ten parasangs.

…here it was during the day, when sound does not travel as well, that the High Priest recited his confession… As Rabbi Levi said: Why is a person’s voice not heard during the day in the manner that it is during the night? It is due to the fact that the sound of the sphere of the sun traversing the sky generates noise like the noise generated by a carpenter sawing cedars, and that noise drowns out other sounds…

As we approach Yom Kippur, we might ask if this is true? Does sound really travel further at night? And if so, why?

Yes. It is true

Rabbi Levi is correct. Sound does indeed travel further at night, as you can see below in this helpful graphic. (For the man with the trumpet, think Cohen Gadol. For the dog, think Jericho.)

From here.

The first thing to know is that the speed of sound is dependent on the temperature of the air. Sound moves quicker in warm air and slower in cold air. During the day the sun heats up the earth’s surface, and in particular it heats up the air that is closest to the ground, which is where the sound travels the fastest. But a heat gradient bends the sound waves upwards, much in the same way that a lens bends light rays. (The gradient in which atmospheric temperature decreases with elevation by an amount known as the adiabatic lapse rate.) As a result, the sound waves travels up and away from the listener, and the sounds are quieter.

The reverse happens at night. At night the ground cools quickly. The higher air is warmer than the air close to the ground. The sound further from the ground travels faster at night causing the sound wave to refract back towards the earth. The listener now hears them as louder than they were during the day. It’s physics! (Though it should be noted that some physicists dispute this explanation.)

It’s not just sound waves

Why radio waves travel further at night. From here.

Here’s a fact that Rabbi Levi did not know. It’s not just sound that is heard better at night. Radio waves are heard better at night too, though for an entirely different reason. To be precise, this does not happen with all radio waves, but just those on the AM and short wave frequencies. Because radio waves only travel in straight lines, they do not follow the curvature of the earth’s surface, and so have a natural range of only 30-40 miles. But they can be transmitted up to the ionosphere, where they bounce off of it and down, back to earth. At night, that ionosphere is protected from the electromagnetic radiation that streams from the sun and tends to distort it. And so the radio waves are reflected back down with less interference, which means they travel further and are easier to detect. As a result, some distant AM radio stations (remember those?) can only be heard at night, though the whole thing becomes rather a moot point since nearly everything broadcast can now be found on the internet, for which the ionosphere is not needed.

Noise pollution

We have demonstrated that sound travels further at night, using our knowledge of the properties of sound waves and the phenomenon of refraction. Rabbi Levi knew none of this, but he had something that very few of us today have: a quiet natural environment. What many of us never experience thanks to noise pollution, he experienced each and every night. He, together with the other sages of the Talmud lived in a world that had no noise other than the sound of human voices around a crackling fire and the background music of the natural world. It was an utterly different experience. Our modern world has given us many things to be grateful for, but noise is not one of them.

May you be blessed for a quiet and peaceful year ahead.

גמר טוב

Ketuvot 86b ~ Who Wants to Marry More?

 תלמוד בבלי כתובות פו ב

יותר ממה שהאיש רוצה לישא אשה רוצה להנשא

More than a man desires to wed, a woman desires to be wed.

What happens if a man owes money to both a debtor and to his ex-wife to pay for her כתובה?

In today's daf, the Talmud teaches that if this unlucky person can only repay one of the debts, he should repay the creditor and not his ex-wife. Although this ruling might discourage women from getting married in the first place, we should not be concerned, because "more than a man desires to wed, a woman desires to be wed."  

We've had other occasions to look at sweeping statements made by the rabbis of the Talmud about ways women view marriage. Resh Lakish famously stated (יבמות 118) that "it was better for a women to live with a husband than to live alone" (though you may recall that there were at least four ways to understand this statement of Resh Lakish). We also noted that the late Rabbi J.B. ("the Rav") Soloveitchik believed that this statement reflected "an existential fact." (It also turned out that he was wrong.) While the Rav didn't declare our new psychological insight to be an "existential fact," does it have any validity to it in today's society? Do women really want to be married more than men?

Societal norms change very fast

In 2015 the US Supreme Court heard oral arguments about whether the Constitution guarantees same-sex couples the right to marry. On the one hand, Justice Kennedy pointed out that the traditional  definition of marriage "has been with us for millennia.  And it’s very difficult for the Court to say, oh, well, we ­­— we know better."  On the other hand, gay marriage was then legal in 36 states in the US. (It is now legal in all 50 states, but stay tuned.) The lesson here is that societal norms of about all aspects of marriage are changing very quickly. It may indeed have been true in talmudic times that women wanted to marry more than did men, but our society is vastly different. And with that note of caution, we may proceed.

Who Wants to be Married?

In 2011 the anthropologist Helen Fisher and two colleagues released the "largest and most comprehensive nationally-representative study of single men and women ever done." They surveyed 5,200 single people in the US aged 21 to over 65, and found "a new picture of single Americans emerges that is radically different than it was 50 years ago..." And what of the talmudic claim that women are more eager to marry? It does not seem to be true, (at least in the US).

This national survey clearly shows that men are just as eager to marry as women are; 33% of both sexes want to say “I do.

A 2021 version of the same survey found that “men (42%) are more ready to find a long-term romantic relationship than women (29%).” So today, at least in the US, it is not correct to say that women want to be married more than men.  Some of Fisher's other findings about the attitudes of single men might surprise you too:

Men in every age group are more eager than women to have children.  Even young men. Among those between ages 21 and 34, 51% of men want kids, while 46% of women yearn for young.  Men are less picky too.  Fewer men say it is important to find a partner of their own ethnic background (20% of men vs 29%  of women said this is a “must have” or “very important”); and fewer say they want someone of their own religion (17% of men vs 28% of women said this is a “must have” or “very important”).   Men are also more likely to have experienced love at first sight...

Let's give the last word to Dr Fisher, (who serves as an advisor to Match.com), and remember the danger of assuming that human nature does not change.

My colleagues and I have put over 60 men and women ages 18-57 into a brain scanner to study the brain circuitry of romantic passion.  We found no gender differences.  This..study supports what I have long suspected: that men are just as eager to find a partner, fall in love, commit long term and raise a family.   It’s an illuminating, indeed myth-shattering, new set of scientific data.  And the sooner we embrace these findings, and fling off our outmoded and unproductive beliefs about both sexes, the faster we will find—and keep–the love we want.

Ketuvot 86 ~ 1,000 pages, and Counting

Tomorrow we will study the 1,000th page of Talmud in the current Daf Yomi cycle.  That's right, Ketuvot 86 is the 1,000th page. Here's how:

 64=ברכות 

 157=שבת

105=עירובין

121=פסחים

22=שקלים

88=יומא

56=סוכה

40=ביצה

35=ראש השנה

31=תענית

32=מגילה

29=מועד קטן

27=חגיגה

122=יבמות

86=כתובות

Add that all up and you get...1,015. Whoops? Not really. As you may recall, each new מסכת (tractate) of the Talmud has a title page, but the text always starts on page 2 (ב). So we need to subtract one page for each of the 15 tractates we've covered so far. And 1,015-15=1,000.

Pagination in the Talmud

It wasn't always the case that Ketuvot 86 meant the same thing to all readers. Before the printed Talmud, everything was written by hand, and your particular manuscript (if you were lucky enough to have one) might well differ from that in another town.  Here, for example, is the opening of the ninth chapter of Ketuvot, (the one we are currently studying in this Daf Yomi cycle,) in the 1342 manuscript held in the Munich State Library (Babylonischer Talmud – BSB Cod. heb. 95. 1342.) You'll notice how completely different it looks from anything we have today:

Opening of Ketuvot Chapter 9 (=83a), Babylonischer Talmud – BSB Cod. heb. 95. 1342

According to Marvin Heller (who knows everything about early Hebrew printing and the printing of the Talmud) it was Daniel Bomberg, a Christian printer who lived in Venice, who established the form of the Talmud that we have today.

“The first complete edition of the Babylonian Talmud, the edito princeps, was printed from 1519/20-23. The Bomberg Talmud became a standard for the editions that followed, almost all subsequent editions adhered to his layout and foliation.”

— Marvin Heller. Earliest Printings of the Talmud. In Mintz and Goldstein. Printing the Talmud 2002. p 73.

Bomberg printed the tractate Ketuvot in 1521, and so that is the earliest date we would recognize where we are now- Ketuvot 86, the 1,000th page of the Talmud. 

Some Light Summer Reading Suggestions

There are many novels with 1,000 pages of more. Perhaps you've read JRR Tolkien's Lord of the Rings Trilogy,  or Tolstoy's War and Peace?  What about Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, or Victor Hugo's Les Miserables, (only 1,504 pages, in paperback!) None of them appeal to you? Want something a bit more biblical? Then try Thomas Mann's Joseph and His Brothers, a retelling of a few chapters of Genesis...in 1,400 plus pages. (It must be good - he won a Nobel Prize.) Too high-brow? Then consider Stephen Kings's It (only 1,104 pages) Too scary? Then go for Charles Dicken's classic Bleak House; it's a story about the injustices of the British legal system, and the Penguin Classic edition is 1,096 pages long. Perfect beach reading.  

“I looked up War and Peace and it’s about this guy Pierre who fights in France, and all this terrible stuff happens to him, but in the end because of his charm he gets to be with this girl he really loves, and who really loves him even though she cheated on him.”

— Gary Shtenygart, Super Sad True Love Story

Visualizing Numbers

1

​Back on January 5, 2020 we opened the new cycle of Daf Yomi with Berachot 2.

10

Ten. It's no big deal really, other than we count using base 10 because that's how many fingers we have. We learned the tenth page of  the Talmud (Berachot 11) on January 14, 2020.

Ten is actually of great importance in Judaism. Here are some of the significant ones:

• There were Ten Plagues in Egypt

• There were Ten Commandments. 

• The Torah (Deut. 26:12) commands that the poor be given one-tenth of our produce: כי תכלה לעשר את כל מעשר תבואתך בשנה השלישת שנת המעשר 

• We observe the annual Ten Days of Repentance from ראש השנה to יום כפור.

• There were Ten Martyrs that are rememberer in Jewish prayers on יום כפור.

• There are said to be Ten Lost Tribes of Israel.

• There are Ten Sephirot in the Kabbalah.

• Ten men are needed to make a minyan.

100

We studied the 100th page on April 13, 2020. That was Shabbat 38.  100 is of a special number, it being the square of 10. 

We make a big deal out of 100. It's the basis of our percentage calculations, and we count centuries based on their 100 year cycles. 100 is also the sum of the cubes of the first four integers: 100=[1x1x1]+[2x2x2]+[3x3x3]+[4x4x4].

Rabbi Meir taught that  a person should make 100 ברכות every day ( מנחות דף מג, ב). A person should hear 100 notes blown on the שופר on ראש השנה.

1,000

“1,000 is also a huge deal in our world and has a bunch of nicknames, like a grand, a G, a kilo, and k. It’s also part of the elite chain of numbers in the “order-of-magnitude” chain, which we know as million, billion, trillion, etc. Million is actually the third number in that chain, with the dud 1 as the first number and 1,000 as the second number. And 1,000 is the key multiplier that defines the whole chain.
That said, 1,000’s dirty secret is that it’s a fraud like 10 and can’t be made into a square. The square root of 1,000 is an embarrassing 31.62277660168 etcetera without even a vinculum”

— Tim Urban. From 1 to 1,000. Waitbutwhy.com

So we’ve covered 1,000 pages of the Babylonian Talmud. There are 2,711 pages in all, so we’re not even half-way done. But we’re closer than we were yesterday, and we will be even closer tomorrow. Congratulations to all who've reached this milestone.

Bomberg Talmud Ketuvot, title page 1521. From Marvin Heller, Printing the Talmud; A History of the Earliest Printed Editions of the Talmud 1992, p.147.

Ketuvot 83b ~ Cucumbers, Gourds and the Marshmallow Test

In the middle of a discussion about the rights of a husband to his wife’s property, we find this gem:

כתובות פג ,ב

אמר אביי: בוצינא טב מקרא

Abayye taught: a small gourd now is better than a large gourd later

Here's how Rashi explained this pithy phrase:

 בוצינא דלעת קטנה קרא דלעת גדולה והאומר לחבירו קח לך דלעת קטנה בגינתי או המתן עד שיגדילו וקח גדולה טוב לו ליקח הקטנה מיד כי לא ידע מה יולד יום

...When a person says to his friend "you may take this small gourd in my garden now or you can wait until it grows larger and then take it" it is better to take the small gourd immediately, because you cannot know what the future may bring.

This is a fairly unremarkable observation, and it finds a similar expression in the adage "a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush." The meaning is clear: it's better to have a small but certain gain rather than risk a larger one that is less certain (though see here for an interesting alternative origin of the expression). This is Rashi's explanation. But there is another way to explain the phrase (and this is followed by the Koren-Steinsaltz Talmud).  According to Tosafot, cited in the name of Rabbenu Tam (d.1171), the saying means the following:

ומשל הדיוט כך הוא שאדם אוהב הקישות יותר שיהנה בה מהרה ממה שהוא אוהב דלעת ולהמתינה אע"פ שהיא טובה יותר

This common saying means that a person would prefer [fast growing] cucumbers because he can enjoy them sooner, rather than gourds [which grow slowly and] which require waiting, even though they [taste] better. (Tosafot, בוצינא טב מקרא, Ketuvot 83b).

So according to the great Rabbenu Tam, the aphorism does not address any element of risk. Instead it is addressing the ability to have self-control and to plan for the future.  The larger reward is certain, but is only available if you can wait. In fact, Rabbenu Tam is describing the famous Marshmallow Test.

The Marshmallow Test

The man behind the Marshmallow Test is the psychologist Walter Mischel, the emeritus chair of the Department of Psychology at Columbia University. He was born in Vienna and fled to the US in 1938, and sadly he died in September 2018 at the age of 88. His obituary in The New York Times noted that his studies on “delayed gratification in young children clarified the importance of self-control in human development, and…led to a broad reconsideration of how personality is understood.”

The test is simple: give kindergarten children an option -one reward now (in the original experiments the children could choose any reward, not just a marshmallow) or two if you can sit and not touch the reward for fifteen minutes. The studies were performed at Stanford between 1968 and 1974 and involved some 550 children.  If you haven't already seen what the test looks like, grab a coffee and watch the video. It's quite wonderful.

There have been dozens and dozens of academic papers written on the Marshmallow test, since Mischel first published his findings in 1969.  But perhaps most surprisingly, the findings of the Marshmallow experiment on pre-schoolers seems to predict the future behaviors of the test subjects when they are adults. Here is Mischel summarizing his findings in his new book called (predictably enough,) The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control.

“What the preschoolers did as they tried to keep waiting, and how they did or didn’t manage to delay gratification, unexpectedly turned out to predict much about their future lives. The more seconds they waited at age four or five, the higher their SAT sores and the better their rated social and cognitive functioning in adolescence. At age 27-32, those who had waited longer during the Marshmallow Test in preschool had a lower body mass index and better sense of self-worth, pursued their goals more effectively, and coped more adaptively with frustration and stress. At midlife, those who could consistently wait (“high delay”), versus those who couldn’t consistently wait (“low delay”), were characterized by distinctively different brain scans in areas linked to addictions and obesity.”

— Walter Mischel, The Marshmallow Test 2014, p5.

Wow. That's some test. But before you run out and test your preschool aged children (or grandchildren), remember that according to Tosafot, most people prefer a smaller instant reward to a larger but delayed reward. The classic Marshmallow Test measured how long young children could control their desires for an instant reward, but gives a new insight into  this daf. If you can hold out for slow growing gourds rather than go for the faster growing cucumbers, you might just do very well in later life. And that’s a good lesson to think about on Rosh Hashanah.

Wishing you a happy, sweet and healthy New Year from the entire Talmudology team.